Limited to 1080i? That's a 16x9 aspect ratio... I had a CRT that did 1600x1200 back in like 1995. Are you thinking of just TVs? Because most of them did suck. There were lots of excellent computer monitors however...
This doesn't surprise me though. The high end Sony monitors always had trouble with flyback transformers and people that had those were quick to replace them with whatever the latest tech at the time was. The crappy 14" monitors were cockroaches that never broke. Now they get to torture zoomers with 60hz 800x600 lol.
One of the other niceties associated with crts as a result. A monitor that you could just plug in to a source and it would work, from a time when manufacturers didn’t have the ability to kneecap your setup with handshake bullshit. Now hooking up stuff is just a bit more likely to be frustrating and nonstandard setups are much more likely to simply not work without pricey extra hardware. Want to split your bluray player or playstation 5 between a an oled television and a projector? It may just work with a basic hdmi splitter, or it may not. It may only work with certain hdmi splitters. It may only work if one display is on at a time. With dvi you could’ve gotten a basic splitter and it would’ve worked guaranteed regardless, but hdcp means that hdmi splitting will give you headaches because god forbid you hook up a secondary source to record a copy of content you purchased. Despite that, it’s still easily defeated with relatively cheap hardware, making it completely and utterly pointless as well